Everybody knows that content is king in the realm of internet marketing. And it’s quite a hard task to produce it, because it must be not only original, but also specific to the interests of your target audience—so it’s obvious that your first order of business is to know your customers.
In addition, this original content must be generated regularly, in order to keep your followers’ interest piqued and to generate sympathy toward your brand consistently, which is an obligatory precondition for the success of your internet marketing campaign.
Social media marketers, among other web marketing professionals, face an even more difficult task, because they need to harness maximum speed, content trendiness, and freshness. Social networks are like a high-speed train: You won’t be able to outrun it, so you better get in and learn what it’s all about.
SMM specialists use different methods to handle the myriad difficulties; they need to always be online, be active on the web, and follow the latest trends on social media. In short, they must live as an inevitable part of the social media culture; they must be friendly members of the greater social media community, not just witnesses to it.
This direct connectedness between brand and customers is the most beautiful thing about the internet. Moreover, it presents an opportunity for the reverse tendency to appear. This means that not only must marketers become users, but simple users can also—and do, in fact—become marketers.
So, like real social media marketers, users begin to produce original content for their favorite brand. Why not? They have a mind to think and fingers to type, and they have something to say about the product they use, so it’s not surprising that such a phenomenon as User-Generated Content (UGC) has arisen in the area of free informational space.
What is User-Generated Content?
User-Generated Content is media information that is produced by the actual users of the product. Generally, the term doesn’t have any marketing implication—it just defines a variety of media content created by users.
This type of content became mainstream in the mid-2000s due to the growing popularity of different web communities such as forums, image boards, blogs, and so on. Later, the social media data set is also added, but for now social networks act as the main platform for user-generated content.
Actually, social media users produce it every day, when they post on their Facebook pages and tweet on their Twitter feeds. Indeed, it’s a chaotic ocean of pure information. And our task here is to make it work for our brand. But how do we do that? Let’s check.
How to make UGC work for your marketing success
The first thing we need to remember is Amazon.com. And what we specifically need to remember about this giant online retailer is that a major part of its content is created by its customers: they simply leave their responses regarding products.
Nowadays this is usual practice for eCommerce websites, and it’s rather fair that you can make pre-purchase judgments concerning a brand based on the opinions of real customers. And this is what you can learn from: you can simply use this technique for your social media pages.
Indeed, people are eager to express their mind, especially regarding the things they have paid for. Your task is just to concentrate this mind-expressing energy in one place: your social media account. Let you customers write on your Facebook page, retweet their tweets about your product, etc.
You can even do it with negative posts and turn it to your marketing advantage: just remember the Poop Tweet campaign, when the negative tweet was replied to with a witty joke, and resulted in this company gaining plenty of retweets and followers.
What are the benefits of UGC?
Some benefits of UGC are obvious. And though some of them are not so noticeable, we can surely state that this tendency is a great opportunity for social media marketers to create activity on social networks and in turn make their accounts and pages even more lively and animated. There are two great points of benefit every social media marketer should take notice of:
- Self-producing content. Even if you don’t have access to the internet to post new content, UGC wouldn’t leave your social pages at a standstill.
- Autonomous activeness. That’s almost magic: you can forget about social pages for a while, but with the assuredness that they won’t lose followers—all thanks to starting up the mechanism of free exchanging of opinions about your product.
You no doubt realize that user-generated content plays a considerable role in today’s internet existence, so the next logical step is applying it in your social media marketing activity in order to become a natural part of this existence, and thus achieve success for your brand on the internet.
From MavSocial | Social Media Marketing Software for Business
